🚀 go-pugleaf

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/ingdahl2.html
"But there has been a marked global decrease of students willing to
study physics, and funding has decreased accordingly. Not only that,
the best students are not heading for studies in physics, finding
other fields more appealing, and science teachers to schools are
getting scarcer in supply. In fact, warning voices are being heard
about the spread of a "scientific illiteracy" where many living in
technologically advanced societies lack the knowledge and the ability
for critical thinking in order to function in their daily
environment."

Examples of scientific illiteracy:

http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca/mediasite/viewer/?peid=5f32739a-624d-4ec8-9ecc-4d44d3d16fe9
Lee Smolin: "Newton's theory predicts that light goes in straight
lines and therefore if the star passes behind the sun, we can't see
it. Einstein's theory predicts that light is bent...."

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo: "I am by profession a theoretical physicist. By every
definition I am a fully credentialed scholar-graduate work and Ph.D.
at Cambridge, followed by a very prestigious research fellowship at
St. John's College, Cambridge (Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam formerly
held this fellowship), then a Royal Society research fellow. Now I'm a
lecturer (the equivalent of a tenured professor in the United States)
at Imperial College. (...) A missile fired from a plane moves faster
than one fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the
missile's speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its
speed with respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus
that of the train. You might think that the same should happen to
light: Light flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what
the Michelson-Morley experiments showed was that this was not the
case: Light always moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that
if I take a light ray and ask several observers moving with respect to
each other to measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree
on the same apparent speed!"

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper
in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong
that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star.
He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two
hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But
although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put
forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell
and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like
cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall
back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two
Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always
travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down
light, and make it fall back."

http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie ou: Pour
en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part,
nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumière
est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais,
empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée
avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait même que de
futures mesures mettent enévidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle,
du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la
lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais
variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les
procedures operationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat"
deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La theorie elle-meme en serait-elle
invalidee ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer,
il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs
plus economiques. En verite, le "premier postulat" suffit, a la
condition de l'exploiter a fond."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05EED81E3EF932A35752C0A9629C8B63
Brian Greene: "As we pass each other in the street, this rotation is
imperceptibly tiny; that's why common experience fails to reveal the
discrepancy between our respective senses of past, present and future.
But just as a tiny angular shift will cause a rocket to miss a distant
target by a large margin, the tiny angular shift between our notions
of now results in a significant time discrepancy if our separation in
space is substantial. If instead of being next to me, you were 10
light years away (and moving at about 9.5 miles an hour), what you
consider to have happened just now on earth would include events that
I'd experienced about four seconds later or earlier (depending on
whether your motion was toward or away from earth). If you were 10
billion light years away, the time discrepancy would jump to about 141
years."

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html
Steve Carlip: "Is c, the speed of light in vacuum, constant? At the
1983 Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures, the following SI
(Systeme International) definition of the metre was adopted: The metre
is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time
interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. This defines the speed of light
in vacuum to be exactly 299,792,458 m/s. This provides a very short
answer to the question "Is c constant": Yes, c is CONSTANT BY
DEFINITION!"

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com